Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines: For Sister Wangechi Mutu
Sonia Sanchez
“Poet. Mother. Professor. National and International lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women’s Liberation, Peace and Racial Justice. Sponsor of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Board Member of MADRE. Sonia Sanchez is the author of over 16 books…” So reads the beginning of the ‘about’ section on Sonia Sanche'z’s website. She is a figure of great importance in the “Black Art” movement. Her poetry (and her performance of it) is suffused with the voice of her people, and a spirit of defiance and revolution. I cite a few lines (from her website) by different writers about her poetry and approach:
“With an unblinking and critical poet’s eye, Sonia Sanchez has been setting her readers straight, telling the ‘terrible beauty,’ and reflecting images in ways that simultaneously solicit tears and laughter. For over thirty years this revolutionary poet has been undeterred from a path that began in the sixties. She has not given up the struggle to let her poetry be what she refers to as a ‘call to arms’ for her people.”
- Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Ms.
“Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”
- Maya Angelou
“This world is a better place because of Sonia Sanchez: more livable, more laughable, more manageable. I wish millions of people knew that some of the joy in their lives comes from the fact that Sonia Sanchez is writing poetry.”
- Maya Angelou
“Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty.”
- Isabel Allende
“Her songs of destruction and loss scrape the heart; her praise songs thunder and revitalize. We need these songs for our journey together into the next century.”
- Joy Harjo
“The poetry of Sonia Sanchez is full of power and yet always clean and uncluttered. It makes you wish you had thought those thoughts, felt those emotions and, above all, expressed them so effortlessly and so well.”
- Chinua Achebe
I share with you today Sonia Sanchez’s reading of her poem "Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines" at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 21, 2018 in Washington, DC. Below is a transcript of her introduction to the poem, the text of the poem itself and the video. Make sure you watch her performance, along with the text!
I want to begin with a piece that I did for a young woman who's an artist, and she lives in a place called Brooklyn where we can't live anymore because it's so expensive, you know, you know that people have sold out us, you know, the people, New Yorkers, people who retired from teaching or from whatever they were doing and they own brownstones and now they can't afford to pay taxes, you know, so we'll be like - what happens in South Africa - all of us will be living outside on the island and then we'll commute in for work and then at night we leave back out. That's America. That is New York. That is the politicians who sold us out, you know. In a place called America and a place called New York, and a place called Brooklyn, you know in a place called DC, I don't recognise anything in DC anymore because of all the building, but, and the people are placed outside the city, they come in to work, right and then they go out at night. That is what is happening in the world and you know, that is why we need the young people to look at this, because we need to begin to do what I call our sit-ins again but it's a different kind of sit-in, we just sit in these buildings they're building right and said "Thank you for building these buildings, and let me tell you what I can pay, you know, monthly." Yeah.
Sister Wangechi Mutu who put up in one of the galleries her artwork, you know which included television, which included, you know, eating which included all this
all this beautiful work that she did there from paintings, you know, to like all the dolls that she made talking about women, at that point, and they asked me would I introduce her, and I came in after they put it up and I came in and stayed in
there weak, just sitting, looking at her work each day, taking notes, making notes,and I call it "Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines".For Sister Wangechi Mutu.
